Luxury tourism has long told its successes in kilometres travelled. More countries ticked off, more sites visited, denser itineraries: the performance of travel was measured by how full it was. For its 25th anniversary, Anantara Hotels & Resorts, the experiential hotel brand of Minor Hotels, chooses the opposite story. Rather than a campaign of conquest, it offers a collection of five signature experiences built on a simple principle and, in the industry, an almost subversive one: add nothing, just stay.
The initiative runs across more than fifty of the group’s properties throughout 2026, but here it focuses on five emblematic places, in Italy, Thailand and the Maldives, each reinterpreting in its own way what it means to slow down.
Amalfi, the morning as a discipline
At the Anantara Convento di Amalfi Grand Hotel, a former thirteenth-century Capuchin convent overlooking the harbour, slowing down takes the form of a morning ritual led by Brother Marcus in the terraced gardens, among rare Mediterranean plants and ancient monastic herbs. The philosophy of the place, Pace & Bene, runs through the rest of the programme: a visit to the chef’s vegetable garden, a sound-healing session in the convent’s sanctuary, then a picnic of artisanal breads and aged cheeses facing the Amalfi coast. Luxury here lies not in the accumulation of activities but in their deliberately slow sequence.
Chiang Mai, the rhythm of a river
At the Anantara Chiang Mai Resort, the morning is set to the pace of the Mae Ping River. The Nam Jai, a handmade teak boat, glides for 90 minutes along the riverside temples and the community of Wat Ket. The next stage leads on foot to the old Wat Ket Karam and then to the Khua Kaek bridge, with a view of Doi Suthep, before an offering to a monk. Lunch closes the loop with a Lanna khantoke served at Bodhi Terrace, beneath 400-year-old banyan trees.
Maldives and Phuket, the night as an experience
In the Maldives, the Anantara Kihavah Maldives Villas moves the slowing down to the night sky: its SKY observatory on stilts and its telescope, presented as the most powerful in the archipelago, turn stargazing into a form of discovery as intense as an excursion. On the Andaman coast, the Anantara Layan Phuket Resort builds its experience around listening, with a personalised consultation at Layan Life by Anantara that then leads to sound therapy and a Pao Ya heated medicinal herb therapy, before a sunset and a glass of champagne under the open sky.
What this programme reveals, beyond the calendar of experiences, is a wager on the way an international hotel brand chooses to tell its own anniversary. Rather than staging its growth, its number of properties or its new openings, Anantara builds its quarter-century around a vocabulary of restraint, even if it means going against an industry in which the anniversary is usually the occasion for fireworks. The brand, founded in 2001 and now present in more than fifty hotels and resorts in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, seems to be betting that in a sector saturated with spectacular experiences, sobriety itself becomes a distinguishing sign.
It remains to be seen whether this language of slowness, spread over fifty properties and an entire year, will withstand its own scale. An experience designed to slow a guest down does not necessarily produce the same effect when it is reproduced, standardised and marketed across a hotel group of more than 640 establishments. Between the stated intention and its implementation at scale, this is perhaps where the true measure of Anantara’s wager will be decided.
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